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Tuesday, November 15, 2005

What Happens Every Seven Seconds

My editor originally had as the article's headline: "What Comes Every Seven Seconds?" But then he decided against it, fearing that a higher-up would take issue.

Because I have the word "sex" in the article, it runs the risk of garnering an utterly random viewer complaint. Journalists, for all their blustering about things like integrity and responsibility, are pussies who will crumble at the first sign of criticism. As such, any nutcase who knows how to send an e-mail or operate a telephone can get a whole building full of college-educated adults to run around in a full hysteria simply by complaining.

The No. 1 rule to dealing with complaints in television news (and, by extension, TV news-based websites) is this: panic.

Do not fact-check the complaint, do not make an evaluation of the validity of the complaint, just panic. After a good deal of panicking and yelling at people who may or may not have culpability, the standard operating procedure is to then make some sort of ridiculous decree. Ideally, with this decree you want to set up impractical operating procedures, or editorial standards that are at once impossibly narrow and wholly undefined.

So Adam (who is a huge UT fan, by the way) decided to avoid all this and go with a less suggestive headline.

6 comments:

great article, great writing. I liked that they made a point to say that you're married with NO children. I guess we need to know that, otherwise it would seem strange that one of those seconds wasn't devoted to sweet babycakes of the actual baby variety.

Astrid's favorite phrase: "Liquor stores should provide guys with mirrors, similar to changing rooms, in which we can hold different beers to see if the fit the look we are going for: "Hmm, which looks more appropriate when I insult Ely Manning: this bottle of Chapeau Framboise Lambic or this bottle of Coors?" Haha ... that is hillarious!!! I might need to start quoting Chris Cope on a few occasions.

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Who's writing this?

Hola. I'm Chris Cope, author of the books The Way Forward and Cwrw am Ddim. I'm originally from Austin, Texas, but through a series of terrible and wonderful events called "life," I now reside in Her Majesty's United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland -- specifically the bit that is Penarth, Wales. Occasionally I write things.